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It is good to see so many of the nation's political know-it-alls (see: here, here and here) coming around (finally!!!!) to the insight that I outlined AGES ago (well, on Tuesday night), which was that the just-released Benghazi email written by White House aide Ben Rhodes wouldn't prove to be the "smoking gun" that administration critics want it to be. White House defenders simply can cite genuine ambiguity still surrounding what the White House factually knew about the Benghazi attackers, and the smoke from the smoking gun clears.

Not that the Rhodes email is insignificant. The email is further evidence that the White House had no interest in clarifying what actually happened on Sept. 11, 2012 in Benghazi. They could have said what seemed to be the case -- that we just don't know exactly who attacked the Benghazi compound and the CIA annex -- but we'll let you know when we know more. Instead, we got absolute (and absolutely false) certainty about the cause of the attacks from UN Amb. Susan Rice.

Instead, the White House spinners demonstrated that their sole interest was in twisting whatever happened into a positive spin for the president.

Speaking of whom...

There is one element of what happened that night about which there is no ambiguity. And that is this:

What did President Obama do that night?

There is no ambiguity: About what the president did and where he did it, we know almost nothing. The record is clear.

An American diplomatic outpost was under attack. Lives were in jeopardy. Events that night were every bit as dangerous, shifting, distant and dramatic as what happened the night that President Obama gave the green light to go after Osama bin Laden. And, as you may remember, there was no uncertainty or ambiguity about what the president did that night. (See: here and here )

About the night of bin Laden's demise, we know details as finely parsed as the real reason why Hillary Clinton is holding her hand over her mouth in the iconic Situation Room photo (Astonishment? Shock? Wrong! Allergy attack!)

The administration's efforts to get every detail about that night into the media (including that photo depicting SOS Hillary's coughing fit) even spurred a minor media frenzy to find out about the mystery woman poking her head up in the back, looking over the shoulders of all those administration heavyweights. (It was Audrey Thomason, director of counter-terrorism).

Compare all that to what we know more than 20 months after Benghazi about what President Obama did that night. It's easy to sum up. Beyond a conversation with Hillary Clinton and a directive the president claims to have made to his national-security team we know nothing of where he was, who he was with, or what specific presidential orders he issued, we know almost nothing.

The mind-numbing evasions on the subject by White House spokesman Dan Pfieffer in his May 19, 2013 interview with Chris Wallace are just painful to watch. Wallace wants to know the sorts of things the administration supplied by the boatload following the bin Laden "get" -- What, exactly, did the president do? Pfieffer shifts, evades, foot-stomps about make-believe insinuations supposedly baked into Wallace's plain-spoken questions.

Wallace simply wants to know "what did the president do the rest of that night to pursue Benghazi?" He never gets anything approaching a straight answer.

* "The president was kept up to date about this throughout the night..." (By whom? How? By phone? Where was he, if not with his aides?)

* "He was in constant touch that night with his national security team..." (Which ones? He didn't talk to the Secretary of State after 10 p.m. Washington time; didn't talk to the Secretary of Defense; didn't talk to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)

* "He was talking with his national security staff; his national security council. The people who keep him up to date as these things happen" (Again, who?)

These questions do have specific answers. They have to do with the operation of government in a crisis, at which times records are kept about who said what when and about presidential orders, which are given to specific people before being transmitted to people outside the room in writing.

We know what he did the next day. He delivered a speech about the previous night's events -- a speech in which (sorry Candy Crowley!) he did not identify the Benghazi attacks as "terrorism"). Then, we know he went to a fundraiser in Las Vegas.

We know more about who Obama met with after he jetted to Sin City (Jay Z, Beyonce) than we do about who he spoke with on the night of the attacks, or where he was.

We shouldn't be coy about the implications here. The president is known to be disengaged at interesting times.